I’m going to miss TikTok.

It’s light years ahead of any other platform for storytelling. Mixing videos together. Allowing conversations via stitching.

I will miss 8 musicians coming together to play a single song from their own rooms.

I will miss the absolutely unhinged skits. I will miss the funny stories, stupid trends and the general positive vibes of every comment section.

And for all the selling, a relative lack of ads.

TikTok was a platform of “dancing girls” until you sign up and create an account.

I watched the service try out content on me to see what I responded to.

It learned quickly and served me what I can only call a truly “for you” page that I built brick by brick.

On the best of days it was like attending a live screening of your favorite podcast over and over.

A comedy show. A Moth Radio Hour. A poetry slam. And a thousand views of The Eras Tour. And I watched them all.

I never posted I only consumed. But there is nothing out there like it.

This week has been like watching the series finale of your favorite TV show.

It was the most fun social network. The comments were full of support and jokes and positivity.

I never saw spam comments. I rarely saw mean comments. The ability to respond to a comment with a video and to shame the trolls into deleting their accounts and slithering back under their rocks likely helped

YouTube is informative. But it’s not fun. Instagrams Reels… are reruns of TikTok’s. And the comments are mean and rude and often trying to tear the creator down instead of being in on the joke, they’re just mean.

Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are as different as LinkedIn and Facebook. The vibe is just off. Hostile and cruel.

And the ads. The amount of garbage ads I see and the “recommended” content.

For all of Meta’s collected data on me, why do you offer garbage? Same to YouTube. I’ve given you far more hours and years of data.

Why does TikTok outperform you with showing me what I want?

If you’re going to slurp up every last byte of data on me, at least do a good job giving me what I want.

But I know it’s not about me. It’s about you. Trying to push me towards what you want to show me. It was never about what I want to see.

Tiktok served the viewer. TikTok learned what I wanted to see and pushed me to people and content I enjoyed.

Instagram serves AI slop and ads. YouTube serves you pizza after you order pizza. Twitter doesnt deserve a mention.

I’ll miss my friends on TikTok. Their stories. The snippets of their lives.

It’s been a fun ride. Maybe the US can create something fun that won’t be bought, ruined or both.

But I’m not holding my breath.